SxDSalon: A group blog on social interaction design

Topical social filtering – how to create a tag-filtered twitter list feed

Twitter lists are a handy way of paying attention to a group of people with a common interest. But the trouble with using lists to focus attention is that people often tweet on more than one subject. When following a list of people interested in “government 2.0″, the list stream will include a lot of posts on other topics. But if you filter the stream on a hashtag, you now have a stream, with posts by interesting people, only about the topic you care about. Topically filtered li...

In praise of semipermeable social boundaries

In recent weeks, a number of folk have been writing in praise of Facebook’s closed-ended social model. Dare Abasanjo and Robert Scoble write that they prefer discussion threads that are not polluted by the unwelcome voices of strangers, as they are in FriendFeed and Twitter. I’d like to take a contrary position in favor of a more open model of online social interaction. The Facebook model is biased against getting to know new people. The Twitter model is biased in favor of gett...

The end of information, the return of conversation

Dave Weinberger is writing and speaking about the end of information. Information has been the dominant metaphor for understanding the world and people, but this is changing. The evidence of change is before us with the rise of stream interactions in Twitter, Facebook, and other social media. In and among the bots and the bot-like self-promotional behavior there are people talking to each other. One problem with the current form of stream conversation is that it can be hard to see in a distri...